Yeah I can't wait to run my operations on a KYC-guarded, AML-choked blockchain in the US jurisdiction.

(and I'm saying that as a huge crypto/blockchain optimist)

Tether has now moved to Bukele's paradise El Salvador and its backing is managed by Howard Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald. Previously Tether's funds were managed by Deltec in the Caribbean, a bank with a colorful history.

For example, in markets like Latin America, stablecoins aren’t just ‘faster payments’—they’re an escape hatch from broken financial infrastructure. That makes them feel less like a new technology experiment and more like electricity or the internet: invisible, but transformative.

The interesting question to me is: what happens once small/medium businesses start building on top of this instead of just using it for payments? Could we see the same pattern as the early web—where it started as “publishing pages” but turned into entire industries?

There is no technological replacement for trust. To think otherwise is a bit daft.

TerraUSD (UST) NuBits DEI flexUSD

USD has been here all this time. And is a safer bet than any stable coin.

In my finance experience, the answer to the "why blockchain" question is settlement. Every banking system (local, international) has a settlement process.

Settlement is where bank counterparties have to tally up who owes whom, and pay each other. That process still takes time internationally, and is complex because of the parties involved.

A more concrete example (I've audited interbank settlements for a local bank in my country):

When I buy something from Amazon as a crossborder transaction with my Visa, my bank and the merchant/bank that Amazon use enter into a counterparty obligation, where in a direct way they'd have to pay each other, incl moving funds between countries. If these 2 banks are the only banks in the world, they can both tally up the transfer of funds to each other, and then pay each other the difference. That'd still take time, right?

Now, we have hundreds of counterparties, using different systems, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, local clearing houses for EFTs, etc. There's also merchants like Stripe who'll be doing the processing, central banks who also ultimately settle currencies among each other. They all have to wait for proof of funds clearing at some level.

If I'm doing an international transfer to my friend, their bank won't want to just credit their account instantly because the time it'll take for them to receive settlement of those funds isn't instant. Else they're going to pay the cost of a deposit that isn't there (let's assume my friend earns interest on positive balances).

The process is that the banks have to recon each clearing house's balance, aggregate that to a list of values like:

* Amex: owes us R200m * Visa: pay them R300m * Clearing house: etc.

Typically the bank's treasury department then effects those transfers. Don't know about other banks, but the bank I audited, it was done by a person daily, their responsibilities are to ensure those settlement aggregates are received/paid, and to resolve differences.

Beneath this person, at that bank, was a team of people who did recons all day. This was in 2012, so hopefully things changed, but I know that team still exists.

Once settlement's taken place, there's another team that verifies international settlements and then approves transfers to my local account. As a data point, it used to take me ~7 days to receive my salary from a US employer while in South Africa.

With crypto, my experience has been that settlement gets delayed, virtualised and distributed because you have a single layer (or still fewer layers across chains).

You send me USDC from wherever, we already don't involve:

* Payment processors like Visa * Central banks as no balance of payments processes are affected * Banks who need to reconcile cross-payments and settle them

Instead, if we're using an exchange (if you're using a local exchange), the funds arrive in the exchange's wallet shortly. The exchange has a constant flow of users buying and selling their local currency. They're in charge of settlement between their wallets and bank accounts.

I'll sell my USDC into my local currency ZAR, and if I withdraw it, the exchange keeps ZAR in local banks, and they send me that money immediately. My crypto salary would be in my bank as ZAR in 30-60 minutes.

Now, I said that crypto delays settlement. My exchange will eventually run out of fiat currency, or need to rebalance. They'll trade some other counterparty exchange, and settle that transaction through SWIFT/equivalent. That settlement will take the 5-7 day process. They just delayed it for their client.

I said it's virtualised because they've skipped the whole process of moving net flows and relied on a central entity, the blockchain, to do that. Ultimately it's a faster process than that backoffice of the bank.

And distributed. Every exchange or remitter has now become their own micro clearing house, and they participate in the banking system by earning their own fees, running their own process.

They only need to interact with each other at higher levels if they need to convert their USDC to US dollars. Interestingly that process happens at one place, but as long as cash and tokens move bidirectionally, the process can get relayed to the point where only a few US banks need to deal with the issuer of USDC.

Immovable object: The perennial HN hate for all things blockchain, complete TLDR energy when it comes to crypto

This should be interesting

1. We all desperately need a sane digital instant means of transferring money between “institutions” that just works

2. No-one believes that a third party solution would not end up with that third party holding everyone over a barrel (Visa but on steroids). So any simple “use Postgres” is out

3. So it’s either a trustless, open blockchain (bitcoins blockchain or possibly this Tempo). But there are huge drawbacks to The Blockchain - apart from the ratty reputation it has so far, there are problems with making a reversal of payment of both parties don’t agree, and other issues as nauseum.

I don’t get how well tempo solves any of this.

4. We end up with what I think is likely to be the solution(s). Islands of “trust groups” that replace SWIFT and its like with blockchain in a piecemeal fashion, but the cost benefit ratio is totally subsumed by the massively high costs of replacing the towers of process, regulation and software balanced on top of SWIFT etc

4.a. Or the central banks introduce their own “stablecoins ” - and people punt all the complicated bits of law and regulation and reversals over to the existing legal regulatory frameworks.

In short the ultimate problem is that sending a signal moving 1 million dollars from Kenya to Kansas is simple (wooden sticks did this a millennia ago).

The problem is a legal, cultural, social framework that all parties can trust and believe will fix their grievances. That’s basically … the global Legal framework we have now, with the solutions we have now including following court orders.

If the electronic system cannot follow the current frameworks requirements (ie the old lady did not mean to send her life savings to that wallet, get it back) then the electronic system still needs overlays that can - and there is not just a lot of complexity - there is an incredible amount of complexity

I get the feeling I’m yet again talking myself out of thinking we can have a sane digital currency for similar reasons to why we can’t vote electronically.

I’m paying for my round at the bar in cash.

I would love for stripe to start paying appropriate VAT on transactions between their merchants and EU citizens, I've been on their ass about it for nearly a year now. I've reported multiple merchants to them which simply refused to provide an VAT invoice for any transactions. Legally, merchants outside EU are required to pay VAT on their B2C transactions if their EU transaction volume goes above a certain limit, and provide VAT invoice for B2B transactions (but with 0% VAT because it is B2B).

But unfortunately Stripe doesn't seem to have the technology to do a SUM(*) in their database, or check if an email address ends in '.de' or '.it' when they take the payment. So they simply do not give a damn if their merchants provide an invoice with the transaction or not.

Oftentimes it was the problem to actually get an invoice document which has company name, company registration number, street address, city, and tax ID. Extremely basic information which is required on all EU invoices. Many times I have submitted invoices from Stripe merchants to my tax accountant and my tax accountant told me that those are not proper invoices and to please reach out to the merchant to get EU-legal invoices.

Stripe has the technological capabilities to implement proper compliance checks, but they choose to let their merchants send you rubbish self-made PDF invoices with a big red "paid" stamp without any information or "official" Stripe invoices with total fantasy names and fantasy company information. You never know if your merchant is sitting in an embargoed country or is just some schmuck from San Francisco trying to hide their ties to a website.

If other HN users from the EU have been fighting Stripe to get EU-compliant VAT invoices for their B2B or B2C purchases, please feel free to reach out. I've been doing a big stink about this and to me it feels like a deliberate pattern of enabling their merchants to ignore EU VAT obligations.

It's really sad that my extremely positive impression of Stripe has been deeply tainted by this kind of experience across various purchases and subscriptions with Stripe merchants. I had to spend so much time pleading with them to provide proper invoices.

Actually even then I still consider it nonsense.

Blockchain's primary usefulness has been to evade regulations, and due to the rapidly changing nature of the technology, representative democracies with legitimate legal institutions have lagged behind when it comes to regulating it.

The country that wins (prevents fraudsters and scammers who exploit crypto) will be a dictatorship solely because a dictatorship is the only form of government fast enough to either rein in lawless cryptofinance, or exploit it maximally.

When enough actual value creating people who bought in to the libertarian crypto fantasy finally realize that they're slaving away to make ends meet in an economy that enshrines meme coin shills and folks who use crypto to evade the law, it will have been too late.

—-

1. https://killedbygoogle.com/

Do you have any information which geopolitical actor controls tether? Is it China or Russia trying to circumvent SEPA? Or North Korea because north korean hackers have so much bitcoin from their ransomware operations?

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/tether-us-treasury-holdings-s... [2] https://yellow.com/news/stablecoin-giant-tether-slashes-trea...

None of this has anything to do with the format of any invoices. If you wrote a receipt on a piece of toilet paper, that's fine as long as you can prove that you then sent 30-50% of the money you received to the US government. I believe this is more generally a feature of common law legal systems which prioritize honest intentions over box-checking.

Whatever other requirements exist in other countries are not really a US business's concern, unless those countries start turning their merchandise away at the border. In any case, expecting a random payment processor to act as world paperwork policeman for the EU is hilariously ridiculous.

Why does Stripe want to creatively ruin their reputation by venturing into crypto / blockchain?

I don't see anyone in the real world using blockchains at all.

I get AI as it was a real world paradigm shift, but I have never seen anything in this blockchain / crypto space that has reached 100-500 million users let alone 1 billion users, that isn't based on speculation.

Ah yes, the good old "permissionless" blockchain, that's 100% centralized for just the first 100 years of operation, give or take [subject to updated timelines after 100 years]

https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/number-of-cryptocurrencies-...

Bitcoin is decentralized because the sun distributes energy somewhat evenly across the globe.

The other 206701340 crypto projects, including this one, are decentralized because ... ?

From the very sparse info on the page, it seems this project does what so many other chains do to make payments faster and cheaper: They log them on a database that is synchronized across only a few computers.

In other words: I can't find any info on that page explaining how they plan to achieve decentralization.

Good luck to Stripe though. Building the network effects necessary for an L1 is very difficult.

So not decentralized at all. The only reason to not open source validators and allow the public to run their own is to make insiders rich. Another crypto grift that will mint a few millionaires before either being forgotten or merely being used as a speculative instrument.

But I had literally said that stripe should've actually ventured into and created their own cryptocurrency or something...

Tada, I might be one of the happiest person thinking that I actually really predicted something by my own observations.

here's the blog post: https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...

By what I meant most crypto, I meant anything aside from stablecoin (like gold backed/usd backed)

Now that being said, I am still a little critic as to I don't see any offical stripe message and I don't see a way on how it would be implemented?

Like one of the things that I wished in my article was this idea that someone on twitter originally asked where currently if you had money in stripe and wanted to pay it anywhere else, you had to have it enter your bank which might take 14 days and then lets say you want to give it to someone else who has stripe(think anthropic), then they would get it back again after 14 days

So someone basically asked to create something similar to a stripe card. I think that this blockchain is it, except I feel like that you could send money to anyone in a non kyc manner too via this which is again a plus point for sometimes where I feel like that in this world every transaction is usually tracked and as such something like this change is really welcomed.

Once again, can someone really explain what is going to happen in tempo's future as maybe its me who couldn't focus in such a website. I actually went and read the article that the other company that partnered with stripe (paradigm), so I just read paradigm's article: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2025/09/tempo-payments-first-blockc... and they say that it is a new incubator/partnership b/w stripe and them, but would that mean that this tempo is going to be integrated in the stripe ecosystem or no?

I always thought that stripe and stellar had some deep connections but honestly I couldn't care less about it. I don't care about these fake tokens but rather stablecoins/gold stablecoins

I honestly thought this was fake and not from stripe the first time I saw it. (I kinda still do with that domain.)

The bonds are sold en masse, and the value of those bonds will be hit, driving up gov borrowing costs (plus they just lost a source of demand), meaning the stablecoin “bank” could be bankrupt, right?

With stable coins you’re really trusting a private company to invest your money in a way that is robust to a drop in confidence. Isn’t this high risk? If a coin gets large enough, is it a threat to government solvency?

Second, Tether is not a regulated stablecoin in United States.

> Attributes: High motor

What is meant by that?

[1] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tempo-xyz/aab97703-13e2-42e8-9fb9-9...

Something claiming over 20-30 tps onchain is usually a big blocker. Big blocker design is well recognized as insecure: no end user is able to run a full node locally, only datacenters are able to keep up with 100k tps load. Which diminishes entire purpose of creating a blockchain. Could have been a database with 100k tps or 3-of-4 validator multisig like Hyperledger, wouldn't matter.

> A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model.

> Protect your users by keeping important transaction details private while maintaining compliance standards.

Sounds like it actually has potential. This could enable global QR-code payments using and open, decentralized, and private system. Something like fiat cash payments, but digital. I hope that Valve is keeping track of it, for starters.

* https://www.nist.gov/blockchain

Specifically the yes/no flowchart on whether "you may have a useful blockchain use case" (Figure 6 - DHS Science & Technology Directorate Flowchart):

* https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distribut...

Asked a crypto friend how to manage it in 2025, he pointed me to a service that I could use with Google Pay. Mental. I was just walking into normie places and paying with my ill-gotten gains.

It's gone mainstream for sure.

I wonder if that's intentional or left in from debugging the animation when it was being created. As-is felt like a nice easter egg and I appreciated it being included.

The one that really stands out to me is

“ 03 :: Predictable low fees

Transform your cost structure with near-zero transaction fees that are highly predictable and can be paid in any stablecoin.”

I question why some of large companies that are named here as partners would want this.

Being a Stripe customer from Country XY, charging my customers in USD and getting charged a hefty fee by Stripe for the conversion when I have a payout, I wonder how this would affect their business model.

For example, in markets like Latin America, stablecoins aren’t just ‘faster payments’—they’re an escape hatch from broken financial infrastructure. That makes them feel less like a new technology experiment and more like electricity or the internet: invisible, but transformative.

The interesting question to me is: what happens once small/medium businesses start building on top of this instead of just using it for payments? Could we see the same pattern as the early web—where it started as “publishing pages” but turned into entire industries?”

I can't see this as a positive because of how Stripe has behaved in terms of preventing transactions in the past. Although Tempo is behaving more like a b2b model or fintech-specific orgs in this case, the shoe-drop is when they decide a particular bank, or fintech org, or product is not allowed to perform the transaction on their network after the market capture takes place.

This sounds like a „private blockchain“, which loses a lot of the advantages to me, but, if designed correctly, it may still produce a very solid and long living platform if there are many parties interested in keeping it running.

Do consider me skeptical that Stripe will actually cede enough control for this advantage to materialize since that’s just not what companies are incentivized to do.

I run e-commerce business and I’ve received bullshit chargebacks before. But I’m also a consumer and I’ve filed legitimate chargebacks before.

Related: I’ve also had my bank send money to the wrong place before.

There must be some means of reversing transactions in some cases. Some arbitration mechanism. Some dispute resolution procedure. Some means of doing escrow.

Can anyone answer this? (I'm not asking to be rhetorical or negative, just critical but inquisitive).

     Tempo is a purpose-built, layer 1 blockchain for payments, developed in partnership with leading fintechs and Fortune 500s. With support for all major stablecoins, Tempo enables high-throughput, low-cost global transactions for any business use case.

This isn't even for you or I, nevermind grandma.

I agree, but with trampoline payments approaching standardization (it is in use by electrum and ACINQ/Phoenix wallet already) and async payments, the 24/7 issue should be gone.

I DO agree that stablecoins are different and probably have a different setup - they are still centralized and require trust (that the underlying asset is held accordingly), while Bitcoin/L2-Lightning are completely decentralized.

This one is: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/toncoin/

That's more or less exactly what this is. Stripe is launching an EVM L1.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine part gives it a mature tech stack with experienced developers and auditors. Plus, well-tested smart contracts that have already processed billions of dollars on other chains can be deployed on Tempo.

The "Stripe L1" part will ensure that it's fast, simple, near zero cost.

Indeed you can! We even have a name for that! Its called a blockchain.

> This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost, controllable to a given extent -- no takeover possible, ...).

Blockchains can do all of these things.

Perhaps you are thinking of "bitcoin", instead of "blockchains"? Bitcoin, something that was created a whole 17 years ago, indeed has many drawbacks compared to modern blockchains.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...

I'm guessing the GENIUS Act had something to do with it too? Now that bank depositors have an incentive to hold bank-issued USD stablecoins given their priority in cases of bankruptcy[0], it seems likely there will be a lot more transactions with them as well

0. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/158...

You mentioned sub-cent tx fees, 100k tps, and what I presume to be atomic swaps for stablecoins. Are you thinking about something like $0.10 fees or something like $0.0001 fees? At $0.10 fees at 100ktps that end up representing $100/s in tx costs which is about $8.6M/day or $3B/year. Presumably you expect to make more per year on this project in the ideal case, so are you intending to allow the fees or TPS to "float" upward, or to restrict participation in the L1 to only trusted partners, or for the network operators to make money off the interest from holding the stablecoins' currencies in reserve? What if demand exceeds 100k tps?

Since this will be a corporate backed project how do you plan to handle sanctions and government currency controls, eg if Uncle Sam tells you to drop support for Iranian currency, how will that work?

Will there be account/transaction privacy built into the network through ring cryptography or zk proofs? I'm assuming no, but if your answer is yes and Uncle Sam takes issue with that, what is your plan?

But as long as I don't see somewhat more transparent conversations with the people in your orbit like patio11, Matt Levine, Kyla etc, where you address how you'll actually tackle the non-technical challenges ahead, this GTM communication and site looks like every other 2019 JPM, HSBC etc "something blockchain" announcement and hard to get behind as something that might as well be really different this time, and not be killed/sidelined by vested interests. Including your own.

I completely understand that there are markets and customers that can find real utility in it, but I wonder how many businesses will really ever benefit from stablecoins.

We're in higher education, and potentially our international clients could avoid hiccups with regulation, delays, compliance, and more using stablecoins, but it's really a guess. In the meantime, the pricing model of stripe seems to prioritize bigger and bigger clients.

That being said from Stripe's perspective stablecoins an easy bet to make. They win by building payment infrastructure within the traditional payment ecosystem and win by providing an alternative completely outside of it.

Checks crypto watch, ah, it's Latin America time again.

A little bit of trouble coming up with enough examples of anyone who wants or needs this, I think?

When your algorithm freezes a legit business's funds, you hold them indefinitely and can invest them for your own profit. The only recourse you offer is mandatory arbitration with an arbitrator Stripe chooses.

How is that a fair system?

"A diverse group of independent entities, including some of Tempo’s design partners, will run validator nodes initially before we transition to a permissionless model."

I think Zuck tried to do this. It was called Libra or Diem or I can't remember what it ended up being. Ultimately trust is what matters. In the end whether it was regulation or governments or anything else that killed it, it's only going to work if people can trust you. They trusted you with fiat payments, maybe they'll trust you with crypto. The thing to note, you'll win over the US centric crowd but it's unclear if it will translate truly across borders to Europe, Russia, China, etc. I'm guessing that doesn't matter but just remember what happened. Make sure to be honest about who's actually going to run the payment rails here.

It must be ignorance on my part or perhaps I’m just lucky with residency and clients, but I get paid through services like Wise frequently. Taxes are pretty reasonable and I receive the money instantly on my bank account from US, Europe or Latin America. I don’t really know much better it needs to get.

I can never understand what problem stablecoins are trying to solve.

Even just paying a foreign contractor is a pain in the ass sometimes so if a bunch of banks and financial service providers around the world manage to make international transfer easier via the coins, that’s great. Not everyone cares about the inconvenience of KYC or reversibility of transactions sent internationally. These usecases feel more like shortcutting the complexity of transactions across state lines rather than the regulations we’ve learned about the hard way in a hundred years. Obstacles rather than safeguards.

Or can you explain how these bike importers are being hampered in fiat not by laws, but by technology?

Every time I look at this, the "clever trick" is actually law evasion / law avoidance, to borrow a tax term.

It's about as "clever" as lying to the IRS to save money on taxes. That was never a loophole.

Are you tracking all of this for tax purposes? These transactions all have to be reported to the IRS even for stable coins. This is the biggest thing making crypto payments a non-starter. What's the story here from the end-user's perspective?

I as an individual have no interest in stacking stable coins if when I spend them to businesses, I have to meticulously track each transaction and report it. Whatever you're doing for businesses doesn't seem like it would solve this problem for individuals, if you're even solving it for businesses themselves that is.

Did you look at a non crypto/stablecoin solution to perhaps find something even better for legitimate businesses (and perhaps worse for crooks)?

Using crypto to dodge currency controls?

Of course I agree that currency controls are bad. But, if the use case for crypto keeps being fostering illegal transactions then it doesn’t solve anything a functioning economy needs.

To add some context: our clients in LatAm use DolarApp to spend internationally with a card at the best rates, send and receive cross-border transfers (not just remittances, but also payroll), and to keep their savings pegged to the dollar. Stablecoins let us deliver a much better user experience and significantly lower fees — in some countries, up to 10x better than incumbents.

That said, most of our users don’t care about the underlying infrastructure. They care about the benefits. It’s similar to how someone using a bank card at an ATM doesn’t know (or care) that the system might be running on COBOL.

We see it as our job as product people to absorb that complexity so our users get the benefits without having to deal with the complex mechanics behind them. That’s what we believe is helping unlock a platform shift.

One sign of a technology becoming mature is when it stops needing to be the main character. It starts to make room for what it does, not what it is.

When thefacebook launched, it wasn't a PHP-based social network; it was a social network for college students.

Blockchain has been the main character for a very long time and it's really encouraging to see a product launch like this. Congrats to everyone involved in making this product a reality.

I still don’t quite understand the point of using crypto then - there’s no advantage in it theoretically being decentalizable since practically it is not. It might as well be an implementation detail.

Or are there decentral aspects to how it works? Does it ease auditing? Is it the improved ease of financial/regulatory engineering?

SpaceX using crypto? Are any of their customers seriously going to pay using crypto? Are they gonna pay any of their bills using crypto? I'm not trying to piss in your Cheerios. But making real world use cases not die of uselessness is going to be a challenge.

  1.5%

  $0.045 per credit transfer
  $0.01 per request for payment message
  $1.00 per liquidity management transfer

BTW, it is crypto. So the promise that none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit is a provisional promise at best. Hyrum's Law argues an opposite future.

https://www.wired.com/story/genius-act-loophole-stablecoins-...

I can less immediately expand "easier" and "faster".

Easier: on chain VMs are far from simple or easy, recovery from mistakes is far more complex. Some other aspects such as the implicit common standard might reduce some amount of need for "green field agreement", and the implicit openness of the protocols avoid some of the traps of "here's a rest api, go", but is this the focus? When you look at a wide variety of the big ticket items in everything that needs doing, is the total set easier? Are there surprises there?

Faster: similar to above, this claim is surprising. There's a lot of by-design overhead to a cryptographic ledger system. Lots of things that can be done to make it wider, to reduce latency and increase throughput, but at a fundamental level core operations such as transaction creation require a lot more processing going into a ledger than into a traditional database, even one at scale. Maybe faster here isn't about system faster, but time to product delivery? If so is that common standards? Are there surprises here too, what were they?

Edit: I see elsewhere in the thread you provide some answers in a slightly different framing. A potentially unfair paraphrase and summary seems to be that this enabled integrations to bypass expensive incumbents and comparatively poor traditional infrastructure. If that's a reasonable approximation my question is this: what if you dropped good sized chunks of the blockchain part that is the main system bottleneck, but kept the rest of the properties (shared micro computation model, shared transaction model, common API standard and protocol, eradication of foot dragging incumbents etc).?

Long term I'm still more optimistic on crypto than AI. I think part of the problem with crypto is it needs to be around longer than some government money to prove to people it has staying power. Only then will financial people start doing things like recommend a small crypto stash for your retirement just in case. The average person is not going to make the necessary critical mass move into crypto without some sort permission saying its ok and not going to risk all their money or jail time.

Do they use it to arbitrate NFTs? (need more jargon)

Because SpaceX is definitely something that screams "finance" to me.

> Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and—as far as I can tell—the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.

In particular, using the term "blockchain"/"crypto" to talk about something more centralized / permissioned than e.g. Bitcoin is missing the point: these systems already existed before.

So what do you mean by "crypto" exactly? Distributed systems? I don't think you'll find many distributed systems skeptics on HN.

It's inevitable that agentic AI will handle a lot of workload online eventually. We can't expect these agents to work on existing payment rails, what with their fees and slow settlement and international payment hurdles.

AI agents that can pay each other when necessary - even tiny fractional amounts - will be a massive use case.

People can build their own smart contracts and speculate.

Does Stripe have a perspective on the unique systemic risks that stablecoin exposure might end up having in the new regulatory landscape?

I genuinely do not understand this example. What is spacex actually doing? And why do they even have money in “long tail markets” at all?

Otherwise why not just use normal digital payments? I fail to see why a blockchain is needed to log the transactions.

I’ve heard stable coins are beneficial for the owners of the coin because it’s basically an interest free loan to the token owner.

So I get it I guess!

Edit: I’m only joking a little bit

The website is a bit painful to read but I thought it provided good general information for potential partners.

As as a dev, my questions are why did your team decide to build a new L1 chain instead of an Ethereum L2 and why did you all stick with the EVM architecture instead of looking at something like the MoveVM?

One can look at Stripe's list of investors...

By shifting flows onto a private stablecoin ledger, Stripe isn’t fixing inefficiency; it’s making it easier to route money in ways regulators and tax authorities can’t easily monitor. That’s not innovation, it’s the oldest trick in the crypto playbook: pretend you’re improving payments, when what you’re really selling is a way around the rules.

I'm not surprised, capital controls come and go there, and when they come, they stay for several years.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonmikula_fintech-partner-a...

When this bank employee expressed skepticism of "DolarApp" he was faced retaliation:

https://ia800508.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.flmd.4...

"10. In and around the spring of 2023, Mr. Ibrahim became uncomfortable with certain practices and activities in which the Bank began to become involved. These included practices that, in Mr. Ibrahims opinion, jeopardized the Banks compliance with anti-money laundering laws, federal safety and soundness requirements for depository institutions, and compliance with specific OCC regulations and requirements that were particularly imperative due to the fact that the Bank was already considered a Troubled Institution

14. Mr. Ibrahim further objected to Axioms initiation of new business programs, without first obtaining non-objection letters from the OCC and without review by the Banks internal New Product Risk Committee, as required by written policies. One such project, DolarApp, was of particular concern to Mr. Ibrahim as it entailed cross-border movement of funds, which triggered significant concerns as to whether the Banks BSA/AML controls are sufficient, among other things.

15. But when Ibrahim raised these concerns with the CEO, Ross Breunig, he told Ibrahim to the effect that he did not want to hear it and shut down the conversation.

18. Almost immediately after Mr. Ibrahim objected to these practices, Axiom and Mr. Breunig began a pattern of retaliation. After the April 2023 leadership meeting where Mr. Ibrahim raised concerns relating to CSI and the DolarApp, Mr. Breunig began canceling Executive Board of Director meetings that Mr. Ibrahim attended.

19. Following a leadership meeting in May 2023, where again Mr. Ibrahim raised concerns about CSI, DolarApp and the overdraft positions, Mr. Ibrahim began receiving email cancellations to multiple committees and Board meetings.

20. Upon inquiry, Mr. Ibrahim learned the meetings were not being canceled, but rather he was being uninvited without explanation. Mr. Breunigs hostility with Mr. Ibrahim also became noticeably apparent during this time."

Of course Stripe, Inc. is neither a Troubled Bank nor an untroubled one

Anyway, it sounds like DolarApp could be useful for evading anti-money laundering and bank secrecy laws

"Importantly, none of these businesses are using crypto because it's crypto or for any speculative benefit."

That's only one of the many reasons people might be skeptical of crypto. See above

"They're performing real-world financial activity, and they've found that crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante."

How much of this "real world financial activity" is not criminally culpable

100% no doubt

You could achieve the same things with a proof-of-authority ledger instead of a "stable" coin

Fancy validator selection sounds like the individual financial institutions are still responsible for managing and maintaining their nodes, which gives them a fair (as in balanced not fair as in a lot) amount of liability/responsibility/control.

A distributed database, afaik, while geographically distributed, entails more centralization of power/control.

Well, the law now. The recent stablecoin legislation has a lot of new regulations.

If you mean what technically stops them, then nothing. But that's true of all the crimes I can think of, the law can only be enforced after the crime takes place.

I had tried to describe this effect recently when Trump lowered bank reserve requirements, urging traditional banks to buy stablecoins with the extra funds this gives them.

My comment was that it increased risk (less reserves), without any potential upside in new economic activity. Basically all the money would flow to the govt in the form of treasuries the stablecoin issuers buy.

As opposed to the banks, you know, lending money to businesses.

They are arguing that stablecoins, specifically, require an off-chain entity that ultimately control them. And if you have an entity actually in control, why go through the trouble of blockchain? Then you can just have the controlling entity run a normal non-blockchain ledger.

I like the argument elsewhere in this thread that the actual reason is that it allows running a bank while pretending it’s not, bypassing regulation meant to protect depositors.

Considering that stablecoin wallets can also be blocked what is the case for you keeping a chunk of your money in them?

They're required to by the new stablecoin legislation [0] in a provision that almost looks specifically targeted at Tether. Not sure what the time frame for this is, or if there's actually any appetite to enforce the law if they dont produce a clean audit.

[0] you can read the full text of the law here, too long for HN: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-119publ27/html/PLAW...

But I suspect that if you had to construct an actual argument instead gesturing smugly at innuendo that your point would fall apart.

Please explain your "100x" stablecoin argument and if you feel like it, your asset ratio of items denominated in USD vs USDC.

I’ve always wondered how disputes are handled under such systems.

Otherwise they’re doing the exact same thing.

Stablecoins are three raccoons in a trenchcoat who pinky promise you can trust them.

It's a hedge fund with a dual structure

It is kind of wild how a bunch of people hyping blockchains five years ago has resulted in a thermostatic reaction where a bunch of other people have decided that distributed computing is easy, actually, you just need a ledger file.

Consensus between who? The stablecoin issuer, stripe in this case, is a single party, who are they coordinating with that requires a consensus algorithm?

As opposed to no regulation where you can't? I don't understand this sentiment at all.

Currency controls is what for example Argentine has been doing with set exchange rates and limits on conversion while mandating that all local businesses must be done in their currency.

It is not about controlling the currency, it is about creating hinders for capital movements in and out of countries.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_control

No third party: Almost certainly as a user there are still third parties involved, this isn't (AFAICS and based on other discussions) a user facing chain (edit: correction, they do say the chain is public, but here I really mean user facing value: you aren't minting stablecoins, you have to get them from somewhere). At "envisioned" transaction rates you would in practice not be syncing the chain and interacting with it yourself in any meaningful way.

Settlement: chain settlement is different from financial settlement. Between clearing ends there will still need to be sufficient demonstration of KYC, exchange of some form of actual holdings and so on. Typically the attraction of /to stablecoins is that they're used to perform transactions ahead of movement of actualizable value in target currencies. A possible alternative model is that all invested parties sink actual value into a global sink fund backing the stablecoin that is sufficiently protected to ensure that it does not devalue. In practice organizations almost certainly aren't going to part with wealth on those volumes and will operate secondary private exchange markets and settlement in bulk to escape concerns of short term loss, leverage, inflation and many other dynamics.

I'm no economist, but wouldn't shifting transactions from their currency to another (USD/stablecoin) inherently destabilize their economy even more?

I actually view that as a plus though, they have experience and have seen what works and what doesn't.

Does this mean that you agree with me that when sending money within the developed world and its functioning banking system, cryptocurrency makes no sense?

I ask this because many times when people say "but what about sending money to the unbanked, or developing world without modern banking?", they don't actually mean it. They just want to drop that there, and then use that as a reason to try to convince you that cryptocurrency is awesome for sending money from New York to San Francisco.

> maybe you don't care about them.

Cryptocurrency people absolutely do not care about them. Not at all. I do. I don't want them poisoned with that terrible burden. It's incredibly condescending to say that modern banking is good enough for us in the west, but poor countries should just be given garbage instead.

So: Are you highlighting that part of what I said honestly? And we can then talk about the unbanked without implying that developed banking, where it exists, is anything but superior?

If yes, then the solution is clearly to bring modern banking to the unbanked, not to give them second class status with cryptocurrencies. At least in the long run.

If no, well then I don't see how you highlighting this use case is honest. And I see many cryptocurrency advocates being dishonest on this issue.

I'll assume that you're being honest, and replied yes.

So what do we do about sending money to Nigeria or North Korea? I'll admit to not knowing first hand the practicalities of that, not having actually done it. Have you? US sanctions still allow up to $5000 per year to family or friends in DPRK.

A quick Googling from other countries to DPRK quotes me ~0.7%, with no transaction fee. Western Union seems to charge 4% (actually I expected worse). If 0.7% is accurate and includes currency exchange, then that's actually not that bad. Credit cards here can have worse foreign transaction fees.

But OK, let's say the choice is WU or cryptocurrency, nothing else being available. If you're unbanked, do you have a computer, and the skill to manage a cryptocurrency wallet? If not, then I guess you'll need to find a middleman.

WU seems to charge 6% to Nigeria. I don't have data about what an agent / middleman would charge, but chatgpt says it'll be about 5-15%.

And even if it were 5%, would you trust one of these agents as much as you would trust Western Union? For this 1% discount? Can you trust them not to screw you, and trust them to not get hacked? For 1%?

I'd be happy to hear better data on this, if you have it.

So again, what is the solution for Nigeria? Is it to go cryptocurrency with its enormous complexities, costs, and trust issues, or is it to bring them modern banking?

Again:

> stablecoins have become a preferred means to hold and move money

lol.

What do you think the unbanked would like more: A cryptocurrency wallet to manage directly, a guy in the village with a computer he's "pretty good with", or modern banking with FDIC deposit insurance?

Ethereum had a surgical state change on a smart contract via hard fork that implemented that change, so it had 0 effect on other blocks.

Historically, there have been hundreds of blockchians that were basically slightly modified forks of Ethereum clients, operated by a small group of validators that sacrifice decetralization in order to achieve higher throughput. This seems to be a slightly higher effort verson of that.

*https://github.com/paradigmxyz/reth

  We charge 1.5% of the transaction amount (in USD).

Like, blockchain technology to power distributed ledgers for peer-to-peer payments is pretty interesting and I think I'd prefer it exists, consequences be damned. Stable coins don't really fit the same use cases though, and generally do have at least some reliance on a central party, so it raises the question whether the desired technical properties can't actually be achieved using traditional technology.

Unfortunately, the answers pretty clearly center around not what kind of technology is used to implement the ledger, but rather the choice to implement one versus using existing payment networks. I don't think this is done in bad faith, but rather is the result of very different perspectives.

I think the blockchain skeptics have a point: even if there is something especially technically advantageous about using the blockchain for this purpose that really couldn't be accomplished some other way, so far the only obvious incentive to do things this way appears to be regulatory differences in how the blockchain is regulated versus traditional ledgers.

Very tangential, but seeing major entities and even governments adopt blockchain technology has made me think a lot about potential consequences in the longer term. I really wonder what happens to the properties of various cryptocurrency networks when and if quantum computers scale big enough to start breaking our cryptographic systems. I guess CryptoNote is just toast.

https://www.santandercib.com/insights/innovation/sepa-instan...

That becomes mandatory in October this year

And if I send one I’m carful the details are correct, but I’m not completely doomed if I typo the account number.

Are there other uses? Surely a large and legitimate operation like Stripe and the companies they mention in the blog post would have found additional use cases?

How do you mean? Some banks and bank accounts don't charge.

> how long does it take

It depends. Some transfer types are bank opening hours only, though then it's seconds. Some are batch overnight ones. For some use cases you can do an "internal" transfer internationally instantly, with an international bank. And then on both sides it's domestic instant. With others you don't need that trick, and it's just instant by default.

While this has greatly improved (part of what I meant by stablecoin supposedly being more relevant in the last few years being nonsense), yes the overnight thing is something that's not perfected yet.

Compare this to stock sales. We're down to T+1 settlement now, depending on the market. Imagine someone saying we need to replace the whole idea of money in order to reduce from T+5. We don't.

> without chargebacks

Cryptocurrency advocates talk about chargebacks as if it's a law of nature they managed to find a loophole in.

What exact use case are you thinking of? Customer payments to a business? If you want to reduce (though not eliminate) chargebacks and risk, those businesses are already declining CC, and only accept debit card and bank transfers as payment?

There's a reason most companies don't want to do that, because there's a good reason customers choose to just go elsewhere if they do.

Chargebacks were not an accident, just like "being stuck in KYC" was a deliberate design choice.

"If we do this then we can't get stuck in KYC" is not clever, it's just indistinguishible from crime, and quite possibly is crime. (structuring)

> and what happens if something goes wrong?

If something goes wrong I have a chance to get my money back. Unlike with cryptocurrency, where it's just gone forever.

If fact things have gone wrong with fiat, and it's always been fixable.

Are you being sarcastic? That's literally the most broken thing about cryptocurrency.

Often yes. But also blockchain's can be useful simply for backups and scaling: by cryptographically linking every bit of data together you can be confident that you actually have a complete copy without any errors.

Git is basically a blockchain for this exact reason: starting from a git commit hash, git works backwards, checking that every byte of data is what it should be. Similarly, modern filesystems like btrfs use strong (if not cryptographically strong) hashes for this same reason.

Though in a sense, you're still correct: the "actor" you aren't trusting here is your own computer hardware.

If we skipped the whole blockchain part, wouldn’t it be faster, simpler, cheaper? What value does the whole blockchain, EVM, L1 offer? Don’t they fully control the network? Don’t they decide “everything” anyway?

I’d love to understand it, I’m not a hater, just a developer who don’t quite get this announcement.

My hang-up with crypto is that it solves the ledger-keeping part of running a financial system, but it isn't clear that's actually the hard part! Preventing and remediating fraud, money laundering, etc. are, and crypto makes those issues worse, not better.

Uber rides ARE taxis.

The innovation of Uber wasn't done by Uber it was done by everyone having a GPS enabled always connected phone and computing device in their hand at all times.

> The company [SpaceX] partnered with Bridge, a stablecoin payments platform, to accept payments in various currencies and instantly convert them into stablecoins for its global treasury.

Then as the country’s economy develops the need for these illegal services disappear, or quickly gets you in trouble.

I never got the idea how for that reason there is any guarantees that you can get money out in those less served locations.

- an intermediary credited another institution only to realise later they didn't have the money, and have to beg pretty-please to return the payment over a SWIFT message (there is no guarantee here, at best there is "market practice" which is basically just manners, but for banks)

- an intermediary failing to credit the next institution because of a processing error, but when inquired from remitter claiming they had in fact credited it

Many of these cases are very expensive to resolve. Far more expensive than the value of the payments in question. And for that reason they are often left unresolved.

Now I don't know if I'm convinced on stablecoin remittance, I find many of the counter-arguments extremely compelling, but some days I sure do think gee it would be nice if everyone was transacting on a shared public ledger and I could have some certainty of the status of a transaction.

Actually, you can just use a federated blockchain.

> Everything you're imagining is ALL done much easier with good ol' databases

There is an ecosystem of 10s of thousands of developers that can run specifically ethereum contracts on a database, while being compatible with all existing stable coin onramps?

You have to show me the 10s of thousands of developers is the point. Thats an ecosystem. It means that you can connect to all of these existing apps and on ramps, and smart contracts and more. There isn't a database version of that.

> For example, Bridge (a stablecoin orchestration platform that Stripe acquired) is used by SpaceX for managing money in long-tail markets. Another big customer, DolarApp, is providing banking services to customers in Latin America.

And crucially, the reason to use crypto rails here is a legal one, not a technical one. There's no throughput, cost, or reliability advantage over existing centralized systems. Quite the opposite. What crypto offers is access to a regulatory regime designed through heavy industry lobbying, one that e.g. doesn't even require full 1:1 low-risk asset backing. That would never fly in traditional finance.

None of this implies illegitimacy. Regulatory arbitrage can be perfectly legal. But it does mean the uptake isn't about technological superiority. It's about governments creating a parallel rulebook after sustained lobbying pressure. That distinction seems important to keep in mind.

Would you agree that "actual regulatory evasion" has been a top-three use case across the history of stablecoins? (That is: hackers, money launderers, sanctioned entities, and crypto exchanges do things with stablecoins expressly because doing them with dollars in banks would be illegal in an enforceable way.)

And, would you agree that GENIUS is a formalization of the low-regulation status quo of stablecoins? (That is: the bank system does KYC, AML, and reporting on both sides of every transaction; the stablecoin system generally only does that for onramps and offramps.)

This is not to say "regulatory arbitrage" is the only thing going on with stablecoins. Existing payment rails are imperfect and rent-seeking for reasons that don't have to do with the above. I'm just surprised you're describing the arb as such a non-issue.

These are slow by design - abuse/fraud. How does blockchain solve that issue?

> * Fees that are lower than cards. Card payments are instant, which is often valuable (and superior to many bank transfers), but card transactions are also expensive relative to stablecoins. (And while card authorization is instant, settlement is not.)

Once again - CCs are instant because the % fee pays for fraud and customer service. What is to stop centralized blockchains from incremently increasing fees to the level of CCs over time? ...nothing.

> Crypto is punishing if you make a mistake, but, if you do things correctly, reliability is all-but guaranteed.

Once again - this is a feature not a bug. Things are slow because of bureaucracy AND abuse, not JUST bureaucracy. Crypto is only beneficial today because the actors using it are savvy. When the laggards join, we'll just fall back to the norm.

FWIW - the banking system in the US is awful and the experience to transfer money into other fiat is just as abysmal. However I think crypto's current idealism is a factor of the parties involved, not the technology itself. We're just reinventing finance...it's just this time with Silicon Valley in control instead of Manhattan.

Which misses the mark given the context, since the GENIUS provisions aren’t yet effective or enforceable, and Tether’s history shows that regulatory arbitrage does exist.

No, I am claiming that I couldn't spin up a bank or a stock market on my laptop, that is compatible with all the other stock markets, by forking a git repo.

> that have no non-crypto counterparts, are you referring to?

The git repo fork button, that slots right into a whole ecosystem that has 10s of thousands of contributors to it.

Ease of use, and developer experience and existing markets and existing integrations with all of these businesses is a big deal. It doesn't matter if someone could hypothetically spend 1 billion dollars recreating all of that, using a database. Because that would require 1 billion dollars.

The limitations you're describing are only in place because the countries that are subject to these bank limitations present significant issues (money laundering, terrorism, etc).

What is the breakdown of transaction volumes?

This is definitely a take, given how easy it is to write a program with security bugs using Solidity due to specific concerns like reentrancy that only exist due to the unique way smart contracts work. The inability to "undo" a fraudulent or mistaken transaction without requiring all validators to fork the chain also makes this a non-starter for many developers.

> your users pay to update the state of your application

Also a weird thing to call a "feature" for developers when this actively drives away potential users.

Take the spacex example above. They are using a stablecoin to abstract away a bunch of illiquid and unstable foreign currencies. Getting rid of that huge pain of carrying 100 countries’ currencies via various banks is the value prop. The API could be cobol and it wouldn’t matter.

I assume you've never experienced hyper-inflation? If you have, do you think it's fair that you were forced into a hyper-inflationary currency? And, if given the means to, do you think it's fair that people _should_ have the ability to choose?

That doesn’t make it…less of a scam. I bet drug kingpins make bank too, doesn’t make them any more valid.

Right, but isn't this... bad? Like so bad that it could bring down the entire capitalist system if it is allowed to grow unchecked?

a Blockchain based system can maintain similar effects but with a balance of power

think about it

Hyper-inflation, censorship, corporate takeover of all interpersonal transactions, data harvesting, slow processing, fraud, offshore accounts, scams, laundering. The list feels almost endless.

Luckily we're talking about bitcoin right?

Bitcoin was an interesting idea. 20 years ago. It's entirely without merit now, but it will take decades to fade into obscurity, pumping out carbon the whole time.

(The many other crypto coins since then are mostly BS freud.)

There is a case for banks that hold your hand as if you are 90yo and there must be a case for banking where I know what I do and I take responsibility for my actions.

If i send my coins to the wrong address its on me. But if I want to send 10k to someone - no one should ask me to wait 3 days, to do 100 verifications if I am not being forced or scammed.

I'd want that protection for my mom, sure.

But I want to remove all that crap for me. I don't have time and energy for it

Because literally the only point is to avoid the existing banking system and you can do that with a postures database with much less cpu involved.

This end-run around foreign government monetary control has been touted by Stripe executives as one of the main selling points for USD stablecoins but I don't see how foreign governments don't clamp down on this is in the same ways the clamp down on other uses of USD in the country; most monetary transfers have some physical presence or touchpoints the government can control.

More importantly the US itself is eventually going to come to the conclusion that it does not want people holding US dollars for similar reasons: it also loses control over monetary policy, with excessive inflows un-intuitively leading either to unemployment or excessive debt (c.f. Michael Pettis)

That said, it's possible stablecoin networks succeed for other reasons, particularly having a widely-accepted "API" that is developed at the pace of modern technology companies instead of laggard banks.

All transactions must be derisked (there is a fallback if the transaction fails). This usually means backed with reserves, which also means they cannot be instant.

Now if you don't care for the risk management of a bank, sure, go ahead and do what you would like.

I think everywhere but America has already figured this out.

Instant bank payments are pretty standard everywhere else, even third world countries.

How long is settlement for you and what are the fees. Are you talking about banks for credit card payment processors A business needs a processor which will take fee and add some delay

we used to have markets that worked exactly like what you're describing, it immediately led to disastrous consequences for the broad base of society, and when we figured that problem out, we solved it with rules and regulations specifically designed to prevent abuses

you can suggest reifications of those rules and regulations to make them better, but what you can't do is suggest throwing them out altogether, that's pure regression

I personally use a Ledger device for my crypto. It was super easy to set up (though I wouldn't advise it to my mom, because she tends to misplace things). I linked my crypto wallet to my bank account fairly easily. So we can still get nigh-instant crypto transfers and fast selling of crypto into local currency (Speaking from US here, I think it usually just takes up to one business day). It's still faster than bank-to-bank transfer for large sums, which again, can take weeks for whatever reason they decide.

> wise without a linked account or PayPal or etc is the exact same outcome

PayPal without a linked account is actually pretty terrible. I did a Google search of PayPal frozen funds and this was the first result.

https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1kq14uk/payp...

Wise may have similar issues, I haven't really dealt with them outside of the occasional transfer, but I never let money sit in my wise account.

If you have custody of your own crypto wallet (IE not coinbase), no one can freeze your funds.

Again, I have my qualms with crypto, but the existing shitty state of ways to transfer money makes crypto very attractive. I have trouble even transferring money between my wife and my joint bank account and my personal account (held at two different institutions).

Normal people cannot function in a cryptocurrency ecosystem without these new tech middlemen. This is exactly what I mean when I say _in practice_. Average people are still left to the whims of cryptocurrency corporations that are worse than banks because they're unregulated, much greedier, and much less risk averse.

Miners now replace this since there is a network fee required to transact.

I'm not sure what the current state of affair is, but ETH gas fees were egregious last time I transacted ETH.

Yes the platform running in most banks, usually built on what we call "mainframes", is still mind blowing and with incredible performance. Also just one of those CPU is about the price of a house...

Also the requirements I cited is for running an Ethereum mainnet "Layer 1" node. And most "TPS" happens on the layer 2s anyway.

So it is hard to compare technically. But one thing for sure is becoming an active participant in the Ethereum mainnet has a very low barrier. They got rid of the whole intensive "Proof of work" part about 5 years ago. For a full sync node the waste is more at the bandwidth and disk levels.